Stryd is pushing its recently launched ‘world’s first wearable power meter’. The Stryd performance-enhancing power meter clips on the runner’s shoe, measuring the power runners produce and how efficiently they use it.
Stryd adds that it measures more than twelve metrics quantifying athletic performance, technique, muscle strength and condition, as well as external running environment, and encapsulates these metrics into a single number, power. Power is the key to monitoring training intensity (exertion) and efficiency. Power has given the cyclists who use it a tremendous competitive advantage for years. Now Stryd brings this revolutionary technology to running.
Using power, athletes can see how efficiently they recycle energy from stride to stride instead of wasting it through poor form. Runners can pinpoint the biggest opportunities for improving performance. Then training plans prepared by world-class coaches and physiologists guide them through personalized drills and exercises to strengthen their body so they can maintain good form, and Stryd shows them which specific form changes make them more efficient so they can go faster with the same effort.
Going deeper, leg spring stiffness is a measure of efficiency. Modelling the runners’ legs and body with springs and masses, the mechanical stiffness of the springs determines whether their form and conditioning are wasteful or efficient. Runners can increase leg spring stiffness with conscious form changes and by conditioning their muscles and tendons to supports good form. Leg spring stiffness has never been available from a wearable during running before. Now it is one of the many metrics Stryd uses as a foundation for power.
Leading coaches and athletes who have used Stryd say it is revolutionizing running.
- Craig Alexander, three-time IRONMAN World Champion, says “The power meter has the potential to revolutionize running. It knows how efficient you are, how hard you train, and how well you pace yourself in a race.”
- Bobby McGee, Olympic Running and Triathlete Coach, comments, “The holy grail in running has been to discover such a factor – measuring power in running as a unit.”
- Dirk Friel, Co-founder of TrainingPeaks, adds, “It looks like the future has arrived, a power meter for runners will advance training methods by decades.”
The Stryd team’s goal is to answer three questions. “We’re working for runners who want to know why they haven’t reached their performance goals, what changes to training, form, and race-day pacing will get them there, and how to make those changes,” according to Stryd CEO, Robert Dick. “Measuring power finally makes it possible to answer those questions.”
Stryd was founded by Princeton-trained engineers and builds on years of academic research on ultra-low-power circuit design, wearable sensing, and machine learning. The team is headed by Li Shang, PhD and former Chief Architect at Intel Embedded Systems Research Lab, and Robert Dick, PhD, who won the Computerworld Horizon Award for his smartphone technology.
